Many learning disabled children are victims of perception related disorders. These children have great difficulty in transferring the stimulus received through one sense, such as vision or hearing, into the motor functions of printing, writing or drawing. These children require practice in the motor skills but are unable to achieve such practice by reason of their incapability of transferring the stimulus received by one part of the brain to the motor controlling function of a different part of the brain.
It has been learned, however, that motor functions externally controlled and repeated often enough can establish themselves in the brain. This is known as "patterning." Severely retarded and brain injured children, for example, have been taught to crawl and then to walk by the patient work of volunteers placing their limbs in the proper positions until the correct pattern has been established in the brain. Until the present invention, however, no similar technique has been available for patterning the fine motor skills of writing, while bypassing the troublesome perceptual transfer problem.
It is a primary object of the present invention to provide an educational device for presenting to a child a preprogrammed instruction which may be manually traced by the child with a minimum of perceptual transfer being required. Another object is to provide such a device in the form of a table substantially similar in form to a conventional work table. Other objects, features, and advantages will become apparent from the following description and appended claims.
The closest prior art known will be found in the following United States patents:
U.S. Pat. No. 2,958,956 by Olalainty;
U.S. Pat. No. 3,332,317 by Peckman et al;
U.S. Pat. No. 3,382,592 by Lucero;
U.S. Pat. No. 3,662,077 by Kersten;
U.S. Pat. No. 3,690,020 by McBratnie;
U.S. Pat. No. 3,800,441 by Macpherson.